


More fools than wise

by Lilliburlero



Series: Half Year's Night [2]
Category: David Blaize - E. F. Benson
Genre: 1960s, M/M, Post-Canon, Stealth Crossover, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-24
Updated: 2016-01-24
Packaged: 2018-05-15 14:22:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5788654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Frank visits Hughes in Saffron Walden. A sequel to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/3198695/chapters/6955682">'More happy lives'</a>. </p><p>*</p><p>Note: in addition to tags, Major Character Is Dead, mention of POW experience in the Second World War, inexplicit allusions to (canonical) underage sex, deathbed scene following a stroke.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [El Staplador (elstaplador)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elstaplador/gifts).



> In response to elstaplador's prompt for Gibbons' ['The Silver Swan'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYvZvAihBP0) and _David Blaize_.

Frank had quickly dismissed his initial expectation of Amritsar rugs, printed hangings and intricately-carved occasional tables in rosewood and teak―if Tom had ever owned such things, they would have been lost during the war―without replacing it with any more secure conjecture than that the house would probably not be over-furnished with books. He paid the cabbie and with a trepidation oddly akin to that he felt upon attending a party at which he knew too many of the guests insufficiently well, started up the lane between two timbered townhouses. The huge parish church of St Mary the Virgin loomed over the small dwellings between it and the road, blotting out a winter sunset of the sort he associated with the Royal Academicians of his childhood and did his best not to feel nostalgic about. As he opened the courtyard gate, a red setter leapt to the nearest window and barked; a blonde, unsmiling woman wearing a blue fluffy jumper caught the dog by the collar with one hand and reprovingly drew the curtain with the other.

Tom’s cottage stood in the north-east corner of the yard; on two sides hard by the containing churchyard wall. Frank inched gingerly up the brick path, unbalanced by his gladstone, feeling a fool for letting vanity dissuade him from bringing his stick. His knock brought a muffled response of ‘It’s open―let yourself in!’ 

Entering, he pushed aside a velvet curtain, the unfaded patches of which revealed it to have once been dark green, and promptly entangled himself with a knitted draught-excluder in the stylised shape of a dachshund. There was a rich, redolent odour, as of some sort of braised game. His stomach, which could be qualmish, lurched in the opposite direction to the outer man. Before Frank could recover his balance, Tom had ducked through from a doorway on the right, dropping the tea-towel on which he was drying his hands to extend a steadying arm. Putting down his bag, Frank made an excruciating point of picking up the rectangle of linen―damp through with some pinkish liquid―and gravely handing it back. 

They stared at one another for an agonised moment―during which it entered Frank’s head to turn and go, never see him again―and then seemed simultaneously to conclude that solemnity was more of an indignity in old men than absurdity, and broke into snorts of laughter. 

‘You silly owl, Maddox. Fancy falling over your own feet like that.’ 

‘Why, Topknot, you’re the owl. Don’t you see your house is half a head shorter than you are?’ 

Tom thrust the tea-towel into the back pocket of his trousers and took Frank’s shoulder in a big raw hand. ‘Christ, Frank, I am glad you came.’ He teetered on the balls of his feet, as if he were about to lean forward and down, then let go with an open-palmed gesture of _take your coat?_ He hung it on one of three mismatched hooks mounted on a panel by the front door. ‘Come into the kitchen. I’m running a bit behindhand with dinner, I’m afraid. Jointing a hare. Extraordinary. Like the old king in _Macbeth_ , you know, who would have thought he had so much blood in him.’ Frank withdrew from his overcoat pocket the bottle of sherry he had brought as a guest-gift and followed. 

A surly black-leaded range glowered along one wall of the kitchen; opposite, beneath the window, was a deep galvanized sink and a glass-panelled door leading to a lean-to scullery. A couple of bright rag-rugs decorated the brittle, aged linoleum. Pushed against the back wall were a meat locker, a small dresser and a butcher’s block, the latter scrubbed recently and vigorously clean in a manner that to Frank’s macabre imagination suggested murder more immediately and vividly than could a pool and spray of blood. A bulky pine table and two ladder-back chairs comprised the rest of the furniture. Tom waved vaguely at these on his way to the lean-to. He returned with two earthenware flagons. 

‘Cider?’ he suggested brightly. ‘One of the gardeners up at Audley End makes it, or her husband does. Decent.’ 

The recognition that he was the guest either of a poor man or a mean one could not reasonably be held at bay; he successfully forestalled both speculation as to which and regret at having come. Awkwardly, he deposited the sherry on the table, and himself on the chair that was not occupied by a piece of sacking horrendously stained, which had recently and insufficiently served to protect Tom’s clothes from the bloody hare. 

Tom offered him a dimpled glass pot of cloudy golden liquid, replete with suspensive particles, and and tilted the sherry bottle at arm’s length. 

‘Thank you. Because I didn’t―’ he grinned in the impish way that sat so oddly on a countenance that was in every aspect an elongated version of a _Punch_ colonel’s, ‘have the chance to taste it, last time.’ 

Frank realised only at the sight of Tom’s face that his own must have been primly minatory, and cursed himself for an infernal prig. He had not, after all, come here for stewed hare or an under-gardener’s surplus home-brew. 

‘I―it was the last of a case.’ 

‘Well―we’ll have it tomorrow, shall we? Palate’s quite wrecked by Pat Hill’s sauce―how do you find it?’ 

Expecting something on the crabbish brink of potability, Frank took instead a long, sweet draught of poignant reminiscence. ‘It’s very good. I’m―somehow reminded it’s been rather a long time since I bathed in Byron’s Pool.’ 

‘Not in January, I hope.’ Tom smiled again, with conscious good humour and no intimacy. ‘Don’t wan’t to lose you to pneumonia, particularly. Here, good health. I say―speaking of tomorrow evening. I don’t think I wrote about it. Linda―my great-niece, the elder one―sings a bit, and she’s performing in a concert the Choral Society’s holding at St Mark’s College. Remarkable little place―it was the abbey infirmary before the Reformation, then some cove―a Surrey or a Suffolk, knocked it down and rebuilt it―as something or another. And now it’s a rest home for clapped-out vicars. I’m obliged, naturally, the old avuncular routine, but I’d very much like it if you’d come too. Even if the music’s not up to much, the buildings are worth a look.’ 

The whole thing passed before Frank’s eyes: draughty hall with a smell of pencil shavings and camphor; board-school chairs; _my great friend Mr Maddox_ ; portly accompanist in mothball hat and foxed stole; _Who is Sylvia, who is she?_ ; miscellaneous schoolgirl quavering; _and I will pledge with mine_ ; tea-urns and Nescafé and Marietta biscuits; _here’s to the housewife that’s thrifty_ ; fat, feeling tenor, his patent leather pumps cracked across the toe, groping his way through Schumann; the mauled vowels of _Heil sei euch Geweihten!_

Ambushed by David’s voice fluting, in imitation of one of his luncheon ladies, ‘un po’ di musica, un po’ di Mozartino’, he surfaced, blinked hard and gasped, ‘Thank you, Tom. I should love to.’ 

They ate at the kitchen table, from incorrigibly miscellaneous crockery. The casseroled hare was delicious, and Frank said so, which provoked a disquisition, deferentially laced with the apophthegms of the Audley End gamekeeper, on sport in the county. ‘And―’ he continued, ‘of course, up at the allotments we barter, which accounts for most of the vegetables. Not the mushrooms. Churchyard. On the north side. The best ceps grow on the north side.’ 

Charmed, Frank said, lowering his eyes and allowing his lips to twitch, ‘Unhallowed souls and all that? But what I meant is it’s very well cooked, you know.’ 

Tom contained a splutter and his colour rose. ‘I didn’t know a thing until I came here. Not really. Messes and canteens all my life. Some―improvisations in the field as necessary, but they were always revolting. But―well, masculine helplessness is rather unattractive, don’t you think? And if you can read, you can cook.’ 

Frank, who had once or twice flicked through recipe books, but whose course of life had not prepared him positively to identify a ‘gentle simmer’ or ‘stiff peaks’ when he saw them, nor to ‘fold’ an ingredient ‘into’ some other when neither took the form of a continuous tissue, privately doubted this. 

‘I do hope,’ Tom said, pushing back his chair and clearing the plates, ‘the pudding’s worked out―excuse me―’ 

‘Likewise―’ 

‘'Course. The stairs are tucked into a sort of cupboard in the corner of the sitting-room, but after that it’s obvious―’ he made a swift, downturned moué. ‘I don’t think you need look quite so astonished that I’ve capitulated to the twentieth century to the extent of having an indoor lavatory.’ He grinned, revenged for the unexpected compliment, and affectionate encouragement returned to his eyes. 

There were two sort-of cupboards in the sitting-room, flanking the single bookcase, and the one Frank attempted first was the wrong one. He gazed with obscure disquiet upon a densely ranged mass of assorted lumber: carpet remnants, half-rolls of wallpaper, dozens of tins which had once contained everything from biscuits to paint and now held (one knew instinctively) anything but what their legends advertised, lengths of timber of every conceivable size, a tennis racquet with broken strings and a decayed press, coils of twine, string and rope, flowerpots, tiles, small panes of glass, tea-chests, brown paper, saucepans without lids or handles, the gate-legs of a table, backless chairs, old magazines, curtains, jute sacks, oil lamps lacking their glass chimneys, bundles of papers tied with tape. Malevolent yellow eyes glittered from the sloping depths; Frank jumped and stifled a cry before his own adjusted and he saw it was a fox, a rather small one, stuffed, mounted and mangy. He shut the door hurriedly, feeling he had uncovered Tom’s nakedness. 

The tiny wedge-shaped bathroom, (austere white fittings, pipes boxed in tidily but with no thought to making the work inconspicuous) seemed nonetheless a sort of sanctuary. At the basin, Frank rebuked himself for fastidiousness― _not_ to have accumulated some junk by the time one entered the eighth decade of one’s life would be the remarkable thing; he had, indeed, his own propensity in that direction, and to think that his was the more respectable because it tended to literature was the merest snobbery. 

He returned to the kitchen to find Tom had laid out pudding in glass dishes, the first matching tableware he had hitherto seen in the household. 

‘Good Lord, _îles flottantes!_ How did―’ 

‘My dear fellow, no-one who ever saw them could forget the vinegar faces that Maddox made at plum duff and figgy-dowdy.’ 

Frank, who had made the grave error of denigrating these delicacies in his first weeks at prep school and never quite recovered the social standing thereby lost, confessed that he thought that at Marchester he had adequately concealed his half-Gallic distaste. Tom’s bellow of laughter carried them into the hazardous territory of reminiscence; few men with less than half-a-century’s experience apiece of unintrusive officers’ mess and common room conversation could have steered so tightly and adroitly about the dangerous topics, but then, no man with any less would see the need to. 

They retired to the sitting-room for brandy; Tom put more coal on the lowering fire and excused himself. Neither a cigarette nor perusal of the bookshelves, with their freight of anthologies, bestsellers, memoirs and manuals, their literal handful of 78s and about the same of long-playing records, offered sufficient refuge from knowledge of the conglomeration pent between the left-hand cupboard door and the friendly dead of St Mary’s churchyard. He examined instead a series of hunting prints hung between the stairs and the chimneypiece―no, not hunting exactly, but a midnight steeplechase, according to the legend the first of its reckless kind. The naïve, dashing style of the aquatint and the spindly disproportionate limbs of horses and riders conjured the world of careless, compulsive rakishness that preceded Victorian respectability, now itself entirely swept away; Frank, chuckling at the fustian of the captions― _returned him full rations of his raillery... subjection of their refractory steeds...but his lot was not cast with a “white” bean...like devil-rid maniacs...which brought the villagers affrighted from their beds_ ―found himself suddenly and painfully consumed by a desire to enter it. Removing his spectacles and replacing them in his pocket, he noticed that the picture-frames had been made by a careful, but definitely amateur hand, and the mountings of woodchip wallpaper stiffened with paint of a bilious institutional hue. 

Frank sat down heavily on the unyielding horsehair sofa. He thought he had an intimation, now, of what went on―a word came to him from _Old Mortality_ or _Witch Wood_ , ‘jalouse’, which to him inevitably suggested furtive squinting through louvred slats. And what he saw there were concrete bungalows and atap go-downs, their thatch and their inmates tortured by every manner of creeping thing, courtyards and cellblocks louring with heat and humidity, and everywhere men, four times as many as the compound’s maximum capacity, etiolated figures engaged in the graft of an economy artificially delimited but as real and functioning as any other. The magical thinking of privation: throw nothing away, find an ingenious use for everything that passes through your hands, and you’ll live―no, _whom you love will live_. And when he did not live, that meant not that the logic was faulty but that there was some flaw in the execution of the rite, some trivial squandering: redouble your efforts. Waste not, and thou shalt not be laid waste. He had never got free of it. 

‘Hullo, Frank.’ 

Frank blinked and looked up, lost for even a commonplace in reply. An an inch and a half of ash canted precariously from his cigarette; he stubbed it out. 

‘Rather a brown study―I shan’t ask, though.’ 

Time was _short_. And they had none to waste. ‘I was thinking about you, actually. Do come and sit beside me.’ Frank patted the sofa cushion. 

Tom’s quizzical smile ignited into radiance. ‘Hang on.’ Of cautious habit, he made all safe, shutting the door connecting the kitchen and the sitting room, locking the front door, kicking the preposterous draught-excluder against it and drawing the curtain, closing a chink between the window drapes. Frank remembered the grim-faced female next door, her baby-blue angora and repressive static just yards away, and felt a foolish, transgressive thrill. 

Leaning back from an embrace quickly grown urgent as those begun in the intention of tender solace often do, Frank said, breathlessly, unsteadily, ‘I will take―the very greatest care of you, Tom.’ 

His eyebrows shot up, turning his long forehead into the cartographical signifier of a steep slope. ‘You said that to me once before. And, oddly enough, I believe you this time too.’ 

‘I―I’m so―’ 

Tom pressed his thumb against Frank’s lips, cradling his jaw in a toil-hard palm. ‘And then, if I recall aright, you did _this_.’ His other hand moved decisively and efficiently, and Frank gave himself up to it, groaning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Henry Alken's [engravings](http://lilliburlero.tumblr.com/post/137953663961/henry-alken-the-midnight-steeplechase-1839) of the Midnight Steeplechase, with fustian captions.


	2. Chapter 2

‘We’ll have to stagger a few hundred yards,’ Tom said, ‘this is as far as I can bring the ’bus.’

He parked the well-kept, decade-old Austin outside a row of miniature, putty-coloured habitations that looked rather as if they had been built for a royal child to play at ego in Arcadia than for actual grown people to live in. 

Beyond an iron gate a rutted lane stretched into twilit mist; on either side of it loomed bare woods. Frank leaned on his borrowed blackthorn, glad that the recent weather had been dry and cold. English winters stirred in him a mixture of sentimental melancholy and rough atavism; not so very unusual, as the enduring currency of Bede’s parable of the sparrow in the meadhall attested, but it was queer perhaps that his body took joy only in their opposite, the pitiless adamantine light and heat of the Mediterranean. 

Tom took a large garage torch from the boot of the car. A few small groups were proceeding in the same direction; Tom raised his improbable tweed hat to those including women. Frank, bare-headed, felt keenly the Edwardian redundancy of the gesture; embarrassment that village chits wearing chain-store polka-dots and tartans, their hair in rat’s nests put up apparently with glue, should presume to find his companion _quaint_ issued in protectiveness; only at Tom’s murmur of concern did he realise he must have been glowering ferociously about him and decide to be amused at himself. 

They turned a bend in the lane, and their destination became visible as a smoky shadow splotched with twinkling yellow light, then as a huddle of crumbling madder-coloured brick and tile, sprouting tall, fantastic Tudor chimneys. They passed through an archway into a small courtyard of hummocky lawn criss-crossed by cracked paths. The buildings enclosing it, though all of similar date, were diverse in height, the roof-pitches sway-backed and bearing the patched scars of demolished dormers; narrow, arched windows with leaded panes were set in the walls more, it seemed, at the behest of some very whimsical spirit than with any idea of lighting or ventilating the interior. Across one such, crushed into an upper-storey corner, shuffled a stooped figure, clad in the colours of a Royston crow and apparently headless. He must tell David, Frank thought, he might even get a story out of―he flinched and clamped his jaw tightly. _Even for the least division of an hour―_ It was pretty cheek to feel guilty now, given how very many divisions had passed last night, especially between the hours of eleven and one, during which he hadn’t thought of David and wouldn’t in the least have wanted to. 

Tom scratched the back of his head, dislodging the unlikely hat into outright dubiousness. ‘Rather coals to Newcastle, isn’t it? Hadn’t thought of that.’ 

‘What?’ 

‘Place looks like a Cambridge college in little. And much shabbier, of course.’ 

‘I suppose it does. They’ll all look like this in about fifty years’ time,’ Frank said merrily, ‘after the final decay of learning.’ 

Following a notice, they went in through an ancient oak door and down a short corridor into an institutional drawing-room converted into cloakroom, box-office―and yes, there was the expected oilcloth, stacked cups and urn―tea-room. Frank felt the perverse alcoholic urge customary to men of moderate habits (who fully half the time refuse wine when it _is_ offered) upon discovering that the only refreshments are dry. A jolly middle-aged woman and an anaemic-looking young man took their coats, their shillings for admission and twopences for programme sheets. 

Tom nodded his way across the room to join a fortyish man whose looks were a doughy, unemphatic iteration of his own, and the man's small, dark-haired wife, chic in a simple jersey dress and a bright belt that matched her low-heeled shoes. The girl beside her had the same sallow colouring, but the Hughes propensity to height: though only about twelve years old, she was already taller than her mother. She was clutching a book. Frank sensed they didn’t get along, and sympathised with the daughter. 

There were handshakes and kisses, the inevitable ‘great friend Frank Maddox―’ did they _guess_ , Frank thought, absently how-do-you-doing them all, though how could they? And yet, with modern psychology and what-have-you, how could they _not_? He spoke to Nick about the University, though so vast were their differences in situation and discipline that there was little to say, and he could add nothing to Helen’s discourse on local personalities. The girl Christine, bobbing gawkily and desperately over her mother’s shoulder ( _don’t fidget, darling_ ) had clearly fallen into a mortifying juvenile demographic gap―too venerable a person to associate with the tiddlers clustered around a game of cats’ cradle, but altogether too insignificant to approach the teen-agers stationed, debonair and detached, some with cigarettes, in the passage leading to the courtyard. 

‘What are you reading at the moment?’ Frank asked, conscientiously adopting the tone he would use with an undergraduate. 

Shyly, she showed him. Though Tom was out of his line of sight, he knew from the steady, audible intake of breath that he had seen too, and felt suddenly exasperated. He didn’t need keeping in cotton wool. 

‘Ah,’ he said, taking the copy of _The Thunder-Stone_. ‘Well, _I_ remember this one.’ 

‘I like the old-fashioned sort of creepy stories,’ she said, finding her tongue, ‘better than the ones about slime monsters and giant spiders. I don’t think those things are very frightening at all.’ 

‘I tend to agree with you. Which is your favourite?’ He gave back the book. 

She frowned, employing the universal adolescent ratiocinative aid of polishing shoe-top against calf. ‘I think “The Hackney-Cab Driver” is the _best_. But my favourite is the one about the gorgeous young man who hears the Pan pipes―except I’m not sure it’s really a horror story at all, even though he dies at the end with his face all hij-jusly twisted and the hoof-print on his chest.’ 

That was thin ice, but with a girl one could skate over it. ‘I think you’re right. It’s not. It’s about beauty, don’t you think? Really beautiful things aren’t kind or friendly. They’re cruel and killing. But if you truly love beauty you’ll risk it. You haven’t actually got a choice in the matter, if it’s got its crooks into you.’ 

She digested this. ‘It’s like the Pan bit in _The Wind in the Willows_ , but for grown-ups.’ 

‘I think the author would’ve been rather flattered by that.’ 

‘Oh! Do―do you mean you know him?’ 

‘He was a―’ Jove, he’d nearly said _great_ , ‘quite a close friend of mine. We went to school together. But he’s dead now.’ 

‘I’m sorry,’ she said conventionally. ‘You must miss him very much.’ The formula phrase was far, far worse than confusion or silence, and Frank, gaping and swallowing, was only rescued by the hand-bell summoning them to the evening’s entertainment. 

The concert was being held in the refectory, Helen explained, ‘because the chapel―which would have been more suitable in terms of size, is what we’re raising funds _for_. The roof simply fell in one afternoon last winter. No-one was in there, luckily.’ Frank was glad they were not to be subjected to pews; the dining chairs set out for them were scarcely luxurious, but they had been acquired with old bones in mind, and to look at there was a superb Jacobean fireplace teeming with cornucopia and the heads of blown, pouting nymphs, obviously intended for some room rather grander than this. 

Only when the choir had entered―Tom’s niece instantly identifiable, for only two of the eight women were young enough and only one had the brazenly sensuous gaze that her great-uncle too had possessed at fifteen―did he think to read the mimeographed sheet in his hand. 

Escape, he realised instantly, was impossible. Tom had thoughtfully, and at some disaccommodation to himself, for the chairs were quite closely ranged, given him the aisle seat, but that simply meant that he was at the farthest remove possible from the door. Anyway, there was too much that he wished to avoid for an old man’s dizzy spell or weak bladder to seem plausible excuse: it was a provincial crowd, but the genial, civilised sort for whom courtesy demanded simply that one wait for a break in the music to exit or re-enter. To go out and stay out would seem affected, or even alarming: the cheerful ticket-selling woman would be bound to notice and make bustling offers of sweet tea. No, it had somehow to be endured. He smiled wryly at last night’s condescending estimation of the likely programme: the conductor’s choices were almost vindictively apposite. 

‘Ye Spotted Snakes’ turned out to be the Mendelssohn setting, quite as safe as a lyric with no associations. Then Ramsey’s ‘Sleep Fleshly Birth’―how immensely ecclesiastical it sounded, for a secular song!―bringing with it a train of thought about other elegies for James I's eldest son, which all seemed to dwell in a most tactless fashion on certain passages from the second book of Samuel. It seemed satirical, almost―perhaps he would write to Leslie Rowse about it, or on reflection not; the last time he’d written to Leslie about something concerning the latter’s work, he’d received a rebuking paragraph concerning the poetry of Aemilia Lanier and four pages of prurient speculation about a former pupil of Frank’s, now a graduate student at All Souls’. One of the tenors―fat, but not at all feeling―sang ‘Linden Lea’, which, being invigoratingly different from David’s interpretation of the same, was surprisingly and positively cheering, and then―oh, Christ. But surely half the room would be pinching the bridges of their noses or silently counterfeiting a cough in order to be able to wield handkerchiefs during ‘Fear no more the heat o' the sun’ (Finzi’s setting), and so it proved. Frank had his at the ready, but miraculously, didn’t need it. Then some modern stuff, of which he’d barely heard. 

It was all passing off moderately well, and beginning to enjoy the music for itself, he risked a glance at Tom, who sat, palms on thighs, eyes rigidly and gravely front. Sensing Frank’s look, he returned it with a sidelong grin and a lazy, drooping wink. It truly was the most astonishing thing, that tonight he would again lie in Tom Hughes’ bed and in Tom Hughes’ arms, under the eaves that were just about level with the gravestones in St Mary’s churchyard, that he would wake in the dark and hear Tom breathing―no, even in honeymooning excitement, one had to call it what it was, for it did almost lift those self-same eaves, but Frank didn’t care―that they would embrace again with the late-rising winter sun suffusing the blinds, get up and shuffle about in dressing-gowns, that inarticulate grunts and chortles over coffee, bacon and eggs might―somehow, he didn’t know how it happened, quite―end in ardent demonstrativeness. It was _extraordinary_. Frank, who had never quite shrugged off the immature mental habit of pretending to feel what a sensible person should, instead of what he really did, supposed that sensible person should feel ashamed, as if he had committed a betrayal. He didn’t. He was not a sensible person. 

The concert ended with ‘The Silver Swan’, too familiar, and yet not particular enough to inspire lachrymosity, Frank thought confidently. 

Linda took the soprano part; Frank perceived from the ripple among his companions that with the indiscriminate craving for privacy characteristic of fifteen, she’d kept that rather quiet at home. And despite, or because of, her youth, she was perfect for it. Caught on the cusp between the crystalline purity of pre-pubescence and the warmer tone of adult femininity, her voice was like a excellent Riesling or Gewürztraminer, sweet and cool without cloying. 

Scarcely had he formed that complacent, clubroom thought than the great god who is half a beast and all natural man, who presides over the savage and the exquisite, over beauty and frenzy, over the pure clear flame and the muddied pool, took his terrible revenge upon him, planting a triumphant fiery hoof into his solar plexus, white-hot and hard as iron. A raucous charivari filled his ears, then abruptly ceased. 

It seemed he had been flung back to a night’s vigil at David’s side; he was not sure which one, for David looked as he had at seventeen, but his convulsive fragility was that of his last few days, after the stroke. Frank’s left arm felt numb, and it was only with his eyes that he could see David’s hand was still in his. The light was grey and gauzy. David shifted in the bed. 

‘Frank,’ he said. 

‘Oh, shut up and go to sleep. ‘Tisn’t morning.’ 

‘Right-o.’ 

He watched quietly on, but the dawn did not come. David twitched and jerked his head up, his fair curls like late blossom shaken and sodden by autumn. 

Frank leaned over him. ‘Yes, I thought you might want me,’ he said. ‘But also I couldn’t go away. I wanted you.’ 

There was bright life, howsoever feeble, in David’s eyes, as there had not been in those dreadful final days, when occasionally they opened, disclosing only rolling, jaundiced cloud. ‘Isn’t that ripping?' he murmured, low but lucid. 'And now you have me again, and always. Come away, Frank. We don’t belong any more, and I don’t want to, do you? More geese than swans now live, as the fellow said, more fools than wise.’ 

That being undeniable, Frank went.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Frank's curiosity about the music written to mourn Prince Henry Frederick (1594-1613), much of which sets passages from either the story of Absalom or that of David and Jonathan, is also mine. I wouldn't have written to A.L. Rowse about it either, though.
> 
> Christine's favourite story is this universe's version of E.F. Benson's 'The Man Who Went Too Far', essentially unchanged.
> 
> Much of Frank and David's final dialogue is quoted from the last chapter of _David Blaize_.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not quite sure what [St Mark's College](http://www.stmarkscollege.co.uk/) was actually like at the date this fic is set (January 1964). It was, according to my sources, pretty ramshackle in the early 1970s. I think it's probably unlikely that any sort of social event would have been held there at that time, but I hope readers will grant me a bit of licence.


End file.
